Ruth Padel
Nocturne
Nocturne
Sundown. I imagine my father,
ten years dead, examining the lilied deep,
a whole marine community
on the move while the planet sleeps.
Zooplankton rise
to graze on surface phytoplankton –
that smudge of green you hardly see
but it’s been busy all day
processing the energy of Sun –
followed by a host of arrow worms,
sea butterflies, comb jellies, larvae.
Other tenants of the dark
rise with them. Protozoa, copepods
and krill, a ragtag army
preyed on by larger predators still –
the bioluminescence brigade:
lantern-fish glowing cold
catoptromantic rays,
three hundred species
of dense-packed cephalopods;
and hatchet-fish
following their own fixed upward gaze.
Now he sees torpedoes through the murk –
dolphins. sharks, oegopsida squid
with hooks on end of their tentacles
and, giant of the deep, the slow,
filter-feeding, eighteen-foot megamouth:
shadows, fighting the task of life in the under-dark
alone. But leading this spout of moon-milk
are the jellyfish. You think of them,
don’t you, as flotsam –
mammary and malign, drifting through waves
which toss them on the beach like mermaids.
But tonight they are the stars
flowering to surface in translucent
violet-rose: a million moons
of tangled crystal and tilted curlicues
of lace. A ghost flotilla
escaping when the manhole cover
is removed. Parachutes
blowing the wrong way,
lenticular galaxies, floaters in the retina,
translucent udders
with a whiplash trail of lambent fern.
.
This is the full mooch skyward,
bubbles of the soul, tendrils
of Old Man’s Beard
peeling off from the unconscious
in pulp-and-tinsel-dribbles,
the book of the sea shredding as it unfolds.
The whole procession white as aluminium –
this suits my dad, he is, after all, a ghost –
or white as the sun when it slips
behind a cloud. A convoy
of wraith-buskers, creeping from the Tube
like rebellions of the night. All hail,
O jellyfish, you ripple-fringe
of poisoned toga, blip from the cauldron
of nightmare, the unnamed
that is always there under the surface
and what we were always afraid of.
We didn’t know for sure but we suspected.
Then, at first light, the delicate descent begins
to a bed we only imagine – the floor
we never see, heaving crevices
and bubbled weed. The world is not all black
and all white. You are never safe.